""Begone, buggy spawn of evil!" or "What have they done to you, my beloved?""

Breath of Fire 4.. A pretty good game in it's own rights. It was originally released on PlayStation, but now Capcom appearantly decided that it should be proted to PC. They shouldn't have bothered. You see, whomever ported this game did a horrible job. I'm not talking about a ''Metal Gear MSX to NES''-style bad job. Or even a ''Dragon's Lair Arcade to NES''-style (although wether Dragon's Lair should be counted as a port or just a sequel that didn't really have much to do with the original can be debated. I'm not going to do it here.)

No, the PC version is pretty much the same game as the original. Of course, that means that the graphics and sound are nowhere near todays standards, but that was to be expected. The problem is that thi version is extremely buggy. And I'm not talking about glitchy graphics or messed up menus or anything like that, which makes the game a bit annoying, but still playable. No, this game just freezes. The problem is that it freezes at the beginning of cutscenes you have to watch. And it's not just once or twice either. No, this game freezes all the time. Sometimes you can continue playing by going back to windows, then reentering the game, or pressing the button that make the ''exit game''-menu appear, then leaving that menu. Doing this enough times sometimes make the game continue normally, until it freezes again 5 minutes later. And those methods doesn't work all the time either, so you have to reboot and try again from your last save. Because of this, you have to save all the time, even if you're not doing anything dangerous, since you never know when the game decides to enter a cutscene that freezes.

Because of this, the game is pretty much unplayable.
So I'm not really gonna rate the game normally, since first of all, the only thing that really matters in this game is that it's too buggy to be playable, and secondly, I never got very far in the game due to all the bugs.
Thirdly, if you're one of those people who buy games based on their graphic and sound, the game is a port of an older game, and thus not very pretty. The gameplay is pretty good, but you won't get much out of it since you'll be busy getting past all those bugs.
If you want to play the game, you should track down the PSX original instead. Even if you don't have a PSX or PS2, I won't recommend this game due to the glitches.

If Capcom ever releases a patch that fixes all the bugs, I may write another review that actually tells you how good it really is, but snce they haven't,I really can't say anything good about this game since all the glitches make it unplayable.

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 09/22/03